RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — In a daring midday raid that showed
insurgents’ ability to strike the Pakistani military virtually at will,
militants stormed a Rawalpindi mosque filled with military officers and their
children Friday, killing at least 37 people with a deadly combination of
gunfire, grenades and suicide bomb blasts.
The attack, which also injured at least 86 people, was the
latest in a series of devastating terrorist strikes meant as retaliation for
the Pakistani military’s ongoing assault on Taliban strongholds in South
Waziristan and other tribal areas along the nation’s border with Afghanistan.
The dead included 27 civilians, including 17 children, said
army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.
While the government asserts that it has uprooted Taliban fighters
from most of South Waziristan, military commanders acknowledge that troops have
killed only roughly 600 of the estimated 10,000 militants that are based in the
largely ungoverned tribal region.
Most of the militants and their leaders have fled to other
tribal districts along the Afghan border. In the meantime, militants have
carried out suicide attacks and commando-style raids across Pakistan in an
attempt to erode popular support for the military’s operations.
Since early October, more than 400 people have been killed
in those attacks. As with Friday’s attack in Rawalpindi, the targets have often
been the armed forces, police and intelligence agency installations, or places
where military officers are known to gather.
The boldest of those strikes occurred Oct. 10 in Rawalpindi
at the army’s headquarters, a sprawling, heavily guarded complex that is the
military’s nerve center. Militants shot their way through checkpoints and held
42 officers and civilian workers hostage in one of the complex’s buildings. The
22-hour standoff ended when Pakistani commandos killed nine of the militants
and arrested their leader, but the raid also left 14 military officers and
civilian workers dead.
The latest attack in Rawalpindi appeared to be timed to
cause maximum carnage. It occurred on a Friday afternoon, a period when Muslims
traditionally head to mosques for a special weekly prayer.
Shortly before 1:40 p.m., four militants converged on the
Parade Lane Mosque, the primary place of worship for retired and active military
officers who live in the surrounding Qasim Market neighborhood. The mosque is
located next to an army parade ground, and is about a five-minute drive from
the Pakistani army’s headquarters.
Army officials said the militants did not try to enter the
mosque through a heavily secured main gate. They may have scaled a boundary
wall to get onto the grounds, one official said, though investigators are still
looking into how the militants were able to breach the mosque’s security.
“The area is a high-security zone,” Abbas, the
army spokesman, told Dawn news channel. “But it is yet to be established
where the breach took place. It appears definitely there was a security breach
somewhere.”
Two of the militants entered the mosque, which was filled
with about 200 worshipers, army officials said. The mosque is usually
restricted to active and retired military personnel and their families.
The militants inside the mosque lobbed grenades at the
worshipers while the other two outside sprayed the room with gunfire, army
officials said. Then the two militants inside the mosque detonated the
explosives vests they were wearing.
The two militants outside exchanged gunfire with security
forces. The crossfire kept rescue workers from getting inside the building,
said Abdur Rehman, chief of Rawalpindi’s emergency rescue agency.
Once the gunfire subsided, Rehman walked inside the mosque.
“I saw so many dead bodies,” he said. “There
were charred body parts on the floor, and huge amounts of blood. It was a
terrible scene.”
Police and soldiers cordoned off the neighborhood, while
military helicopters hovered overhead. By late afternoon, army officials said the
other two militants had been killed, though they did not say whether security
forces shot them or whether they had killed themselves.
Abbas said the 10 military personnel slain were a major
general, two lieutenant colonels, a colonel, two majors, another officer and
three soldiers. Among the injured was Muhammad Yousuf, a former vice chief army
commander during Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s rule.
Friday’s attack was the 15th major terrorist strike in
Pakistan since Oct. 17, when the government sent 30,000 troops into South
Waziristan to quell the Pakistani Taliban. This week, a suicide bomber killed
two people outside the navy headquarters in Islamabad, the capital.
Abbas said that as the military has advanced on Taliban
strongholds in Waziristan the militant group has nurtured sleeper cells in the
country’s densely populated cities that are difficult to ferret out, largely
because the militants are able to easily blend in.
“They’re in the pipeline, and they’re probably going to
conduct such attacks,” Abbas said. “So these are the last acts of
this organization — desperate acts. We’ll have to see and absorb a few more
like that.”
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
